1x12 - (Dis)Members Only
Written by: Jeremy Boxen
Directed by: Steve DiMarco
Original Air Date: December 5, 2010
Almost exactly 10 years ago today, Lost Girl episode 1x08 - Vexed aired for the first time on Showtime.
It’s been a while, but I’m finally back on my Lost Girl bullshit.
The second to last episode of Season 1 has Bo and Dyson being all domestic and nauseatingly square and heterosexual, where they go undercover with Kenzi to a rich country club where illegal immigrant employees have been disappearing.
YIKES! What a loaded episode.
And you know what, in honor of an evil megalomaniacal racist guilty of countless crimes against humanity being elected out of the office of US president, I’m gonna post my first Lost Girl Rewatch blg post in months. Yee haw!
I’m pretty sure Kenzi and Hale represent the entire Lost Girl fandom at this moment. This screenshot is so memetic, honestly. So accurate.
Kenzi and Hale, like the rest of us, are fed up with all this boring heterosexual nonsense, and make a bet on when Bo and Dyson will break up again.
For the record, I do support heterosexuality on this show. But only when it’s Kenzi and Hale. I adore them.
So some tree monster is nabbing illegal immigrant employees at a rich white people country club.
To be honest, this episode doesn’t ever delve too deeply into the political and social issues it’s nodding to. It never refers to the illegal immigrants as anything other than “illegals” or “foreigners” when referencing discrimination, and so it doesn’t directly address the issue of racism even though it’s clearly at play--most if not all of the illegal immigrants we see are from Latin America, Kenzi goes undercover as a Venezuelan, and all the country club members are rich white people. The show doesn’t directly acknowledge this even though it wants us to make the connection. It also doesn’t make clear what country we are in. Lost Girl tries to keep it’s location ambiguous throughout its run, so we don’t quite know if we’re in the US or Canada. But...I mean, come on. My money is on Canada.
Let me just explain the Fae of the Week up front: it’s called a “landwyght,” and it is bound to a piece of land on which it periodically feeds on the inhabitants to then fertilize said land with their remains. The remaining inhabitants on the land then reap enormous rewards in the form of riches, promotions, abundant plant growth, and so on. In this case, the landwyght periodically feeds off illegal immigrant employees so that the country club members reap riches.
I feel like it’s pretty obvious they were trying to create some kind of bloated metaphor here a la old school Buffy, where the rich white members of the country club are literally feeding off the sacrifices of the immigrant employees and becoming richer and richer while the sacrifices get swept under the table and forgotten.
But to be honest, I feel like it could have been executed better. The whole thing feels pretty half-assed, and the immigrant employees themselves--the actual victims--are never front and center where they should be. The main focus of our concern is Kenzi, who isn’t a real immigrant, only one in disguise. They only get a parting gift at the end of the episode when Bo lets them rise up and kill the monster. It’s lame at best. Feels very much like a white person wrote this in 2010. I do appreciate the effort, though.
Anyway, an old friend of Kenzi’s from her street days asks for help since his cousin Thumper is one of the employees who went missing. Bo cheekily asks if his cousin is a rabbit, to which the guy replies that it’s just a street name.
“This one’s name was Meow Meow,” he says of Kenzi.
So Bo and Dyson go undercover as a ritzy husband and wife while Kenzi goes undercover as an employee.
Bonus screenshot of Dyson teasing Kenzi and Kenzi flipping Dyson off. Later on in the episode, you will see the characters having a serious conversation about the case while Kenzi and Hale tease and swat at each other in the background, and it just feels very organic. One of the things I always liked about this show was how much the characters felt like real friends.
Creepy groundskeeper staring at Kenzi from the trees. Come on, it’s obviously him. They should already be on this guy’s ass. It’s him! Hello! The creepy groundskeeper!
What’s-her-face is the Chair of the Board of something or other, and her rival basically tells her that she’s going to unseat her. She makes this face when she says that she was afraid of that. Oh, dear.
Oh.
This is her whacking the woman in the back of the head with a golf club and knowingly letting the monster eat her, by the way.
So anyway, Saskia randomly shows up at Bo’s door with a charming sassy insult, as she does. God love her. Only Inga Cadranel could make the character this charming and yet this terrifying at the same time. She’s brilliant.
While Kenzi and Hale are searching the director’s office undercover, Hale tries to turn it into a sexy moment, which Kenzi quickly rebuffs with, “This is not a sexy undercover moment!” It’s another early cute moment. 🥺
Dyson is territorial and tells Bo that he doesn’t want to share her. Blah-dy-blah-dy-blah.
He then tells her that since she is a succubus, it is not in her nature to be monogamous. His exact words.
Bo replies, smartly, that she is more than just her species.
Way to go and mansplain to Bo what is and isn’t “in her nature,” Dyson. And good for Bo for basically telling him that that whole line of thinking is dangerous, untrue, and stupid. Like, WAY dangerous, untrue, and stupid.
Dyson admits that he is territorial and dumb. I do appreciate that, at least. He can see his own flaws. Whether or not he will make efforts to change is another story, but at least he recognizes is shortcomings, unlike Lauren.
Bo tells Dyson that the only way their relationship can work is if there are no secrets between them. Dyson guiltily agrees, but he and Trick are still keeping something big from her.
Dyson tells Trick that he is going to tell Bo everything if Trick doesn’t. Obviously, Trick is a prick about it.
So it turns out that it’s actually NOT the groundskeeper. Okay, fair enough. But still, it was driving me nuts all episode that he was the obvious culprit and it took them until the very end to question him. They could have narrowed their options and found out it was this lady a lot sooner.
Aaaand in the end, Saskia walks up to the precinct and assaults Dyson while he’s waiting for Bo. She declares that she is the one Dyson is looking for.
After Bo arrives and Saskia leaves, with Dyson dying on the floor, Bo manages to give Dyson some life energy back, mastering a new succubus skill that she once saw Saskia perform. We learn that Saskia’s real name is Aife, and she’s someone that Dyson knows.
That’s pretty much how the episode ends. No conclusions. All that’s left is the final episode in Season 1.













